Tag: detective

They belonged to a pimp named Smokey who owns all of the prostitutes working the lower east side, by the docks.

He was beating one of his girls with a wrench when I happened upon them. She didn’t bring back enough money from her last job, or the job before that, or the job before that. He wasn’t being careful where or how hard he hit her. He didn’t care if she ever worked again.

And he was smiling as he hit her. Enjoying it.

I punched him in the face until my hand went numb.

Thought all the blood was his until I saw a small white object sticking out of my glove.

He’ll be drinking through a straw from now on, provided they can reconstruct his face.

Stopped a whole gang by myself today. Thirty-two of them. Gotham’s notorious 10th Street Dragons, an offshoot of the Golden Dragons. Or rivals. Who cares.

Picked them off one by one until I got to their leader. He had four bodyguards. Four of those types of guys who will work for anyone who lets them kill people the way they like to kill them.

These guys liked to kill people the slow way. Soften them up a bit, then cut them up a bit, then get creative with power tools.

They got through the first two preferences with me, but by the time they reached for the Black and Decker stuff the blood had made my hands slippery enough to slide out of the chains.

I kicked one of them so hard I think I felt his sternum crack under my heel. Two of them aren’t going to walk anytime soon. The fourth guy threw himself out the window. He probably didn’t realize I wasn’t a killer like them. I’d much rather someone live forever with the memory of my wrath than to die for what they’ve done.

I have to live with my memories of their crimes, it’s only fair that they should have to live with their memories of my justice.

Though I have to admit, it may have been hard for that goon to know my intentions. I’m pretty sure I was laughing loudly during the whole fight.

I stopped by the public restroom in the subway stop at 18th, one of my pre-planned safe havens, so I could get cleaned up. I left disguised as a homeless man around the morning rush hour. Someone bought me a cup of coffee.

After a night of monsters it’s nice to know there are still angels walking among us.

Like this:

“Two bombs have exploded downtown today within minutes of each other,” the newswoman on the radio declared. “The first was in a music store on Marketplace, the second was in the Paramount Center during a concert rehearsal. The police have no leads so far–“

Click.

Nicky Saint turned off his transistor radio and swiveled his chair around to look out of his office window. Past the words “Detective for Hire” he watched as innocent people casually walked through the snow covered street two stories below. To nearly all Bostonians this was just another cold winter day in January, but to Nicky Saint, this was a day he’d been dreading for a long, long time: January 5th, the twelfth day of Christmas.

The chatter Nicky was listening to on his contraband police radio had already informed him that the BPD had no leads. However, what he heard next was the clue he’d been waiting for.

“This is Lieutenant O’Brien, District C-6 ballistics expert, at the scene of the Marketplace Street bombing,” the voice crackled, “Chief Inspector Lewis wanted an update as soon as I had one. Tell him we’ve determined that the detonation device was planted inside a drum.”

The drummer most likely wasn’t the target, just the trigger, Nicky immediately thought.

Twelve drummers drumming. Two down, ten to go.

Nicky Saint grabbed his overcoat and scarf and headed outside. With dozens of music stores all over town, a handful of performance centers, not to mention dozens more drums in private citizens homes, where would the holiday bomber strike next?

Nicky took out his pipe and lit it while he thought. Killers like this want maximum impact. Explosions are meant to be seen, heard, felt. They’re almost like mini performances themselves–concerts of flame, ash and death.

On the street corner was a newsstand. On the back page of today’s newspaper there was a large advertisement for the music store that got bombed. “Everything must go!” it said. “One day only liquidation sale.”

Nicky flipped to the paper’s entertainment section. Sure enough, there was a concert at the Paramount Center scheduled for tonight. The orchestral drummer was probably just warming up earlier than anticipated.

Where would the next target be? Nicky flipped through the paper looking for more clues. He found the answer on page twelve.

“Three Kings’ Day Parade,” the headline of a short article said. “For the thirtieth year in a row, scores of people will come downtown to celebrate the start of the feast of Epiphany with the journey of the three wise men.” The rest of the article went on to say there would be floats, dancers and a marching band.

A decent sized drum line had at least three snare drum players, five tenors and one bass drum. That’s nine chances to blow the Boston skyline sky high.

Nicky looked down at his wristwatch. The parade was scheduled to start at noon and march down Tremont Street. He had five minutes to make it across town before…

Boom!

A puff of smoke rose up towards the clouds from the direction of Brookline. Police sirens began to wail. People on the street began to point and murmur. Nicky Saint went the opposite direction. He had a parade to stop.

Like this:

“They specifically asked for Duncan McGregor,” said Angus Ferguson in his police report, “but McGregor was nowhere to be found. Probably down at the pub taking in a pint, I thought. So I sent McDaniel.”

They didn’t find McDaniel’s body for hours. It was Fletcher, McBride and Kilpatrick’s bodies they found first. Those were the next three plumbers Angus Ferguson, head of the Gaelic Plumbers Union, sent to the same house when the caller kept phoning in a request for a new plumber.

“It was a woman’s voice,” Angus recalled. “Normal sounding, nothing odd. She kept saying the plumbers I sent couldn’t fix her piping and she wanted McGregor to come, but he was still missing, so finally I decided to go myself. I wanted to see what the problem was first hand, you know.”

The house, located on East 7th Street, had an entrance to the sewer in the street in front of it. When Angus showed up for the call he noticed a bit of blood on the manhole cover. When he looked inside he saw Kilpatrick’s bloody face staring back at him.

The police arrived and investigated. The house was empty. There was no furniture, no plumbing, no phone, and most importantly no woman.

Angus was taken downtown for more questioning. The crime scene was sealed off and a guard was posted. That’s when Nicky Saint, P.I. showed up.

“Anybody ever find McGregor?” Nicky asked the cop on duty.

“The fella the woman first requested? Why would we go looking for McGregor?” the cop said. “He never once came to this address. He’s a lucky lad compared to these poor bastards. They were all brained by their own wrenches.”

“How do you suppose a woman wrestled each of these men’s tools away from them, clobbered them hard enough over the head to kill them, dragged their limp, bleeding bodies onto the street, lifted a fifty-pound manhole cover and dumped them inside during the middle of the day without being caught?

“Well, now, I’ve seen some burly lasses in Charleston…”

“And the first man, McDaniel, they found him ten blocks from here, deep in the sewers, his head in shambles,” Nicky said looking down the manhole to the open sewer line. “That’d take a real burly lass.”

The policeman huffed and said, “We’ll find the killer soon enough. All the plumbers in the area are being told not to respond to any calls for the rest of the week.”

“They only need worry about today,” Nicky said straightening up and looking at the sky. It was near dusk. The air was getting bitter cold. He pulled the flashlight from his pocket and tested it twice. “It’s January 4th, right? The eleventh day of Christmas, and these men are pipers, of sorts.”

“Oh boy, you and your theories, Saint,” said the crime reporter for the Globe stepping up to the edge of the sewer entrance and taking a look around. He wrote something down in his notebook and kept talking, “Although you’ll be happy to know, Mr. Private Eye, that these victims weren’t just pipers in the plumbing sense, but true blue (or should I say plaid?) pipers. Seems as though these fellas were also part of a Scottish bagpipe playing band with Ferguson.”

“Did you get their names?” Nicky asked. He quickly studied the piece of paper the journalist handed him, then gave it back. “There’s twelve names on that list including Ferguson,” Nicky observed. “No need to go looking for these other guys, I’m sure they’re either all dead or about to be.”

“Well, if that’s true then Ferguson himself will be in trouble, too,” the reporter said. “I came from the station house just now and they’ve let Ferguson go. No proof that he did anything other than answer the phone.”

Nicky Saint took a deep breath then started climbing down into the sewer.

“What are you doing?” the cop said.

“There’s twelve men on that list, and there only needs to be eleven victims,” Nicky said pausing on the ladder and looking back up towards the street. “My guess is it’s either McGregor or Ferguson doing the killing. Either way, the confrontation will take place down here.”

“Hey if you see my career, send it back up, will ya?” the reporter called out as Nicky stepped into the ankle deep waste waters of the Boston sewer system.

Mostly they drank a lot, raced their suped-up cars up and down Blue Hill Avenue at all hours and spent a lot of time loitering, combing gel into their hair and making lude remarks about women who passed by.

But they also transported and sold a lot of guns and narcotics. They were a street gang, after all.

Tommy King was their leader. He was a towering 6’4″ bully with a mean streak as long as the Massachusetts shoreline.

“We almost didn’t recognize him,” the police officer guarding the crime scene told Nicky Saint, Boston’s best private detective. “But that’s Thompson Dwayne King alright.” The cop pointed to a three yard smudge of blood on the sidewalk beneath a tall brick building on Tremont Street, downtown. “What’s left of him anyway.”

“This is a long way from Roxbury,” Nicky said stooping down to be eye-level with the street. The snow bank on the sidewalk still had blood splattered all over it. Fresh snow had fallen just the night before, so everything was still clean and white, and now red.

“The chief detective thinks one of the other teenage gangs around here plugged him then tossed him off this building to destroy the evidence,” the cop said. “Mr. King here probably strayed onto someone eles’s turf and got taken for a ride… straight down.”

“That would’ve taken a couple of guys to throw someone as big as Tommy this far out onto the street.” Nicky turned his gaze upwards calculating the angle of the fall with his finger to the top corner of the building. “Any chance he jumped himself? Perhaps a running jump?”

“You know some of the witnesses said they did hear footsteps running up the stairs, before the time of the murder,” the police officer said. “And a bunch of them also said they could hear Tommy yelling out, ‘Happy birthday!'”

“Strange thing to be yelling if you’re being murdered,” Nicky said.

“It was a suicide,” the reporter for the Gazette said stepping under the police tape. “I just came from two other scenes just like these in Fenway. Both of them were members of the Lords as well. One eye witness had even tried to stop a guy from jumping, a boy by the name of…” he consulted his notepad, “Frankie Mullen. Seems as though he too thought he was winning some sort of race by jumping off the ledge of the building he was moving so fast. His last words were, ‘Happy birthday,’ then splat!”

“What would drive three people to do themselves in like that?” the policeman wondered out loud.

The reporter shrugged. “You know these juvenile delinquents are into all kinds of crazy drugs. Dealing, selling, smoking, shooting, you name it. They probably got a hold of some bad dope and it drove them all nuts.”

The cop looked around, then in a hushed voice said, “I hear the kids around here are getting hooked on a new kind of cocaine called Frosty. Supposed to be real powerful stuff.”

Nicky shook his head. “The Lords didn’t use narcotics. Alcohol, yeah, but pills, powder, pot, no. That’s why they’ve been so successful. They sell it, not use it. If they took something, it wasn’t voluntary.”

“So we’re back to murder,” the cop said.

“It is the ninth day of Christmas, you know,” Nicky said, “and they are Lords… a leaping…”

The reporter rolled his eyes. “Not that stupid song again, Saint. Besides, there’s only three of them dead.”

“Not for long,” another policeman said running up to them. He addressed the first cop and said, “I just got a call on the radio, Burt. There’s three more jumpers lined up on the Charlestown Bridge ready to plunge into the river. Let’s go!”

The two police officers jumped into the patrol car and roared off. The siren wailed into the distance.

The reporter ran towards the nearest phone booth to place a call into his editor. The crowd that had gathered around the crime scene started hustling back to their homes to catch the breaking story on their own radios. Nicky Saint stood looking at the blood smeared on the street. He could only think of two well known people who’s birthdays were associated with Christmas. The first was the savior of the world, and the second was a rascally snowman with a magical top hat who just so happened to be named Frosty.

“He just fell off his stool, choking, gasping for air. He was spewing alcohol then blood out of his mouth,” an eye witness said.

“Steam came out of his eyes, I tell ya, and bood from his ears, and green puss from his mouth. Foaming like a rapid dog, then POP! some veins in his neck exploded and he died,” another witness said. “Thank God.”

It was horrific. It lasted two full minutes. There was nothing anyone could do.

“He ordered a Dancing Lady,” the bartender said to the police. “That’s what I gave him. I swear it. Here, I’ll show you.”

He showed them. It contained four different types of fruits, and was served with a tiny umbrella in a martini glass. The cops all looked at the cocktail like it was some newly discovered chemical. One of them tried it. He didn’t die, but the other officers instantly gave him the nickname fruitcake.

The bartender sighed in relief. “Yeah, it’s a girl’s drink. I don’t know why a man would want it, particularly at noon, but I’m not here to ask questions. The fella wants a pink drink, I give him a pink drink. Yeah, I serve it with suspicion, but we serve all types in here.”

The man that died was named Douglas Eckart. He had no known enemies. He was a business man at an accounting firm downtown. He’d been in the place a few times over the last few years. No one could really remember what he drank previously. No one paid that much attention.

The police searched the whole tavern top to bottom and found no trace of poison. They took the bartender downtown for more questioning. The case went cold, until two o’clock when another man died in another bar in the exact same way.

“Yeah, he ordered a Dancing Lady,” the bartender at that tavern said to the investigators. “I didn’t have any banana liqueur, so I had to skip that, but that shouldn’t have killed him.”

The police went through the same procedure. There was no evidence, no residual poison, no connection to the first victim.

By five o’clock, six more people had died the same way. All of them in different bars, but all with the same drink.

“And you know what the crazy thing is,” the reporter for the Globe was telling the police officer standing outside the Union Bar, the site of the latest death, “this Dancing Lady drink is getting popular. People are ordering it left and right.”

“Flirting with death,” the cop said. Across the street, people were pouring into the Bell In Hand for happy hour. Whenever someone ordered the infamous drink, the crowd would go silent, then when the person had taken a sip and survived the place erupted with cheers.

“They think it’s a game,” the reporter said.

“It is a game,” said Nicky Saint, Boston’s one and only white-haired private detective. “More of a puzzle, really.”

“I was wondering when you were going to come snooping around these murders,” the reporter said snidely.

Nicky said the list three times fast before the police officer picked up on it. “Yeah, yeah,” he said snapping his fingers to the rhythm playing in his head. “It’s the last line to that old Christmas song, ‘Decorate the tree with a lot of happy memories, and make the yule tide gay.'”

“So the last victim will be named Gay!” the reporter said. “First or last?”

“Who knows,” Nicky said. “But I know just where to start.”

The P.I. then strode across the street towards the noisy tavern, right on past the entrance to a phone booth on the street corner where he began thumbing through the phone book.

Like this:

Martin Kingsley was sure to be convicted. After all, it was his maids who had been murdered.

Initially the fire at the Kingsley mansion was assumed to be an accident. The blaze started in the kitchen (a natural enough place for one to begin) and spread throughout the servants’ quarters quickly. The firefighters managed to put it out before it reached the main living quarters, but it still caused considerable damage.

Everyone got out except for eight housemaids who were found huddled together in a back room, burned to a crisp.

Yet, upon further investigation it became clear that the fire was no accident, and the maids had not died as a result of the fire. In fact, their skulls had been bashed in with a hammer–violently, maliciously, intentionally.

The murder weapon was found in Mr. Kingsley’s bedstand, bloodstained with bits of flesh and hair still on it. He was also the last one seen in the kitchen cooking himself some bacon for a midnight snack. The grease fire that started the blaze made even the charred wood and brick walls of the house smell like pork.

“Old Mr. Kingsley was a harsh lord,” the butler had said in his interview with the police. “Mean spirited, that’s for sure. Especially towards the lady folk. Mostly with words, if you must know, but on occasion he’d use… other means of discipline. We all learned to avoid him as much as we could.”

“He was much nicer when his daughter lived with us,” the cook said. “She was lovely and kind. The opposite of her father in every way.”

But Maryanne Noel Kingsley had left the house about a year before, quickly, silently and in shame. Rumor had it she was currently living in Delaware with a small child, by herself.

“You know the old saying, ‘the walls have ears?'” the police officer at the jailhouse said to Nicky Saint, P.I. “Well, the Kingsley walls had maids’ ears. Them biddies were milking the old man out of all his money. Blackmail.”

Nicky looked at the old man in question. Martin Kingsley had to be at least eighty years old. He sat hunched in his jail cell, staring at the floor. They said that the only words he’d spoken since his arrest was, “Served them servant girls right to die like that.”

“Close enough for a confession,” the D.A. had replied.

The cop went on talking, though Nicky was hardly paying attention. “My guess is ol’ Mr. Kingsley didn’t like the name of the playboy who sired his heir. That’s why he kicked his daughter out. That’s why he was giving all his servants his money. From what the chief detective said, two more years paying out like that and he’d a been working for them.”

But the facts didn’t add up, Nicky thought. What kind of murderer keeps the murder weapon in such an obvious place? Only sociopaths and psychos who want to be caught, Nicky knew from experience, and Mr. Kingsley was neither. In fact, his mind was so nimble he still ran the daily operations of the bank he’d founded.

Did Martin Kingsley even have the strength to swing a hammer forty times to smash in their skulls? He looked like he had trouble getting from one side of his house to the other. When the police had taken away his cane they had to help him walk to the cot in the jail cell.

“He’s an innocent man,” Nicky declared. “And I can prove it.”

“Big words,” a reporter from the Dispatch said walking into the jailhouse. His pencil was ready to write down every word from Mr. Kingsley’s mouth. It was good publicity for the D.A. office to have a case open and shut so quick, so they’d granted a few exclusive interviews. “You think this murder is related to your Christmas song, Mr. Saint?”

“It is the eighth day of Christmas, and there were eight of them killed.”

“And the old man’s eighty. So what?” the reporter retorted. “Open the door so I can talk to the old guy, would ya, officer?”

Nicky grabbed the reporter’s arm before he entered the rows of cells. “Your paper’s gossip column has tidbits on the young Miss Kingsley now and then, doesn’t it? If I remember right, the last I’d read about it was that the child was rumored to have turned one year-old this last September.”

“Yeah, so?” the reporter said.

Nicky did a quick calculation on his fingers and said, “That puts the conception of the child right around Christmas.”

“What are you implying?” the policeman asked.

“I might know who the father is,” Nicky said opening the door to the outside and stepping into the night air.